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Fabulous Faculty/Staff Award

2019 Faculty Winner, Dr. Jamie A. Lee

Jamie A. Lee attends to critical archival theory and methodologies, multimodal media-making contexts, storytelling, bodies, and ongoing analyses of the ways archives and bodies are mutually constitutive. Her work is intricately woven through the intersections of archival studies, media studies, digital and visual culture, information, and society. Studying hands-on archival work along with archival theory and practice that emerges from community contexts, she engages theories of affect and embodiment, archival and queer theory, haptic visuality, somatechnics, and decolonizing methodologies. Her interdisciplinary approach considers bodies-as-archives and archives-as-bodies in and through shifting temporalities that challenge how we know, produce, and engage archives and their records.

Lee founded and directs the Digital Storytelling & Oral History Lab, DS|OH Lab, as part of her research agenda. The DS|OH Lab is designed to harness the power of people and ideas to creatively engage digital storytelling and oral history production. The DS|OH Lab aims to create a teaching/learning space for digital media production that critically engages storytelling as method with implications for the emergence of multiple histories as complex and often contradictory.

In 2008, Lee founded Arizona's first LGBTQ archives and, since 2011, has been developing the Arizona Queer Archives through the Institute for LGBT Studies. As one of the key sites of her research, the Arizona Queer Archives is a participatory and hands-on laboratory of sorts where archival theory and practice engage queer theory and queer/ed material lives. Lee has developed a Queer/ed Archival Methodology, Q/M, for archivists to utilize in new and existing archival productions to offer a way of thinking critically about archival practices and productions as radically open, productive, and generative spaces that many multiply-situated bodies might fit into, even complicatedly.

2018 Staff Winner, Georgine Speranzo

Georgine Speranzo (she/her pronouns) joined the UA Office for Diversity and Inclusive Excellence as Administrative Associate in October 2016. She has a BA in French with a minor in English from Penn State University and a BA in Linguistics with a minor in Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences from the University of Arizona. She moved to Tucson from Philadelphia in 1998 and has worked at the University of Arizona for almost 20 years.

2018 Faculty Winner Dr. Gloria J. Guzmán Pérez-Carrillo

Dr. Gloria J. Guzmán Pérez-Carrillo is Assistant Professor of Radiology, Director of the Advanced Neuro-Imaging Initiative, Associate Radiology Residency Program Director for Research and Chair of the University of Arizona Health Sciences LGBTQ+ Interest Group. She was born and raised in Puerto Rico. She completed her undergraduate studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore (where she was president of the Diverse Sexuality and Gender Alliance for 3 years), her medical degree at the University of Puerto Rico in San Juan, Puerto Rico, her radiology residency at West Virginia University in Morgantown, and her Neuroradiology Fellowship and Neuroradiology Research Fellowship at the Mallinckrodt Institute of Radiology at Washington University in St. Louis. Dr. Guzmán also completed a Masters in Radiology at the University of Granada in Granada, Spain. Dr. Guzmán has special research interests in advanced neuroimaging techniques, including functional imaging, diffusion spectrum based imaging, molecular imaging of tumor with F-DOPA in addition to outcomes and translational research of MRI in the field of Neuroradiology Imaging. She is also interested in promoting diversity and inclusion within the field of medicine, and participates in multiple initiatives towards that cause, among them as Chair of the University of Arizona’s Health Science LGBTQ+ Interest Group.

2017 Winner Eric Plemons

Eric Plemons is a medical anthropologist focused on the practice of transgender medicine and surgery. His first book, The Look of a Woman (2017, Duke University Press), examines facial feminization surgery, a series of bone and soft tissue reconstructive surgeries intended to feminize the faces of trans- women. Plemons's current projects include multisited ethnographic research investigating how US institutions are responding to a growing demand for trans- healthcare, and a literature-based analysis of how trans- surgical outcomes are studied and clinically assessed. Working out from the contemporary conditions of US trans- medicine, Plemons's ethnographic work in surgical clinics has taken him to Northern Europe and South America.

2015 Winner, Martie van der Voort, LPC

Martie provides triage and counseling services at CAPS (Counseling and Psychological Services). She works with all clients, especially those dealing with eating/body image issues, trauma (has Level II EMDR certification,) addictions and behavioral compulsions, gender and LBGT issues. She has worked in a variety of settings, including outpatient and community mental health. She completed her Masters of Counseling at the University of Phoenix, has been licensed by the State of Arizona as a Professional Counselor, and has a private practice.

2014 Winner, Dr. Shannon D. Snapp

Dr. Shannon D. Snapp is a developmental psychologist with interests in health, well-being, sexuality, gender, and sociocultural contexts that support youth.

2013 Winner, Dr. Adam Geary

Dr. Adam Geary is Associate Professor in Gender & Women's Studies and Affiliate Faculty of the UA Institute for LGBT Studies. His research brings AIDS studies into critical conversations with black studies, Foucauldian studies, and queer studies. His recent book, Antiblack Racism and the AIDS Epidemic: State Intimacies (Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), examines the role of antiblack state violence in producing the social vulnerability and embodied susceptibility to HIV infection that have organized the US AIDS epidemic. Professor Geary received his Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness from the University of California at Santa Cruz in 2004.

2012 Winner, Dr. Stephen Russell

Dr. Stephen Russell thinks the teenage years are the most interesting phase of life. Learning who you are and what you want to be — how thrilling, for young people and for the adults that care about them! His research explores multiple aspects of development in adolescence, but with most of the focus on sexuality, schools and family relationships for vulnerable youth.

Much of his research is guided by an interest in creating social change to support healthy adolescent development. He is most proud of the research that's been used to shape local and state policies and laws for school safety (most directly in California), and his most rewarding work is with students: he works with an amazing group of graduate and undergraduate students, and he finds supporting their development and learning from them to be the most satisfying part of his job.

2011 Winner, Dr Liz Kennedy

Dr. Elizabeth Lapovsky Kennedy received her Ph.D. in social anthropology from Cambridge University, England in 1972 based on her research about the Waunan of the Chocó province, Colombia. Kennedy was a founding member of Women's Studies at SUNY, Buffalo where she taught for twenty-eight years. She is author of Boots of Leather, Slippers of Gold: The History of A Lesbian Community(Routledge, 1993), which received the Jesse Barnard Award for the best book on women in the field of Sociology in 1994, the Ruth Benedict Award for the best book on a gay/lesbian theme in Anthropology in 1994, and a Lambda Literary Award in 1993.

She has also written about the development of women's studies as a field, including the book Feminist Scholarship: Kindling in the Groves of Academe (University of Illinois Press 1983) (with Ellen DuBois et al). Her research/teaching interests include: lesbian and gay history, 20th century sexuality, comparative studies of sexual communities, development of the field of women's studies, feminist pedagogy, feminist research methods, ethnography and oral history.

2010 Winner, Dr. Jennifer Vanderleest

Dr. Jennifer Vanderleest is faculty at the University of Arizona College of Medicine. She sees transgender patients in her primary care clinic, and precepts family medicine residents and community-based providers in clinically informed, culturally responsive transgender care.

Her other clinical and research interests include HIV/AIDS primary care, adolescent health, sexual health education for health care providers, and development of social justice-based medical education curricula.

She has presented about transgender health issues at annual meetings of the Association of American Medical Colleges, International Foundation for Gender Education, Society of Teachers of Family Medicine, American Academy of Family Physicians, and the Gay and Lesbian Medical Association.

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